Why We Need Women to Be Creating More of the Fashion and Beauty Images We See

PHOTO: Film Still from “Sunday” by Alex Prager: Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

The words female empowerment are everywhere these days: news reports, panels, even commercials trying to sell you body wash or paper towels. (As a parody headline in The Onion put it, “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.”) And generally, Glamour is all about that message. After all, “one of the positive things that came out of the election this year is that it triggered a discussion about where we are in terms of gender and inequality,” says Barbara Risman, Ph.D., head of the department of sociology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “That social pressure—people coming together, making demands—is what helps push equality forward.”

But let’s talk about the end goal of empowerment: actual, you know, power. Spending power. Earning power. Political power. And in many of these areas, the stats are…dismaying. Consider: Women account for just 15 percent of the top executives in the United States and less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. We’re only 7 percent of pilots and flight engineers, and 20 percent of members of Congress. As our president-elect would say: Sad! “Our country needs all the talent we can get,” says Risman. “We have lots of challenging issues facing us, and women make up half of that brainpower. To not legitimize the power of women is to rob society of half its talent.”

At Glamour we agree. So we decided to look at our own backyard. How often were we using female contributors to create the images you see on our pages—and how could we do better? We tallied up every assignment we made in 2016, and the numbers were underwhelming: Just 37 percent of the photographers, 32 percent of the hairstylists, and 49 percent of the makeup artists we’d commissioned were women. To be fair, we hit it out of the park in other areas: 94 percent of our writers were female, as were 80 percent of stylists. Our peers in the magazine industry had roughly the same numbers we did, and fashion and beauty insiders say they’re not surprised. On one level, “women power the fashion and beauty industry,” says photographer Amanda de Cadenet. “We are the ones purchasing the product. Every ad and billboard is targeted to us. Yet the images that are being created are not being created by us. It’s kind of offensive!” There’s no comprehensive data, but experts agree women are underrepresented in the most prominent roles. “While the vast majority of photographers, hairdressers, makeup artists, and designers in the industry are women, at the very top it’s mostly men,” says historian Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. According to one study of top fashion labels, just 30 percent were designed or headed by women. And hair and makeup talent follows suit. “Even in makeup, which you’d think would have a higher percentage of women, it’s still very male on the creative side,” says Charlotte Tilbury, one of the world’s top makeup artists and the founder of Charlotte Tilbury cosmetics.

While we as a magazine can’t change the gender gap in places like Congress or Wall Street overnight, we can change our own numbers. That’s why, for this issue, every photographer, writer, hairstylist, and makeup artist the magazine hired was female. And we’re making it our mission to collaborate with more women not just this month but every month, aiming to meaningfully increase the amount of original work we commission from talented female photographers, illustrators, makeup artists, hairstylists, and more by the end of 2017. The point isn’t to elbow men out—we want to see all points of view, and hey, Patrick Demarchelier can come to our party anytime!—but to ensure that ­Glamour looks at the world the way women do. They way you do.

The Future Is Female

Let’s rewind for a second. How is it that women haven’t been getting the biggest, most buzzed-about jobs? There is, after all, an incredibly deep pool of talented women in the fashion and beauty fields out there. (Need proof? Scroll through Insta­gram. We’ll wait.) But women face two major roadblocks, experts say:

Models and celebrities often ask for men. In ad campaigns and even magazine covers, celebrities have a lot of sway. “They get to decide who they want to work with for their photography, hair, makeup, and wardrobe styling,” explains hairstylist Ursula Stephen, who works with performers including Rihanna (who, for the record, has been photographed for Glamour by both men and women). “A lot of women choose men because they like the flamboyant, flirting, and over-the-top performance guys put on. They also don’t want to feel intimidated by other women.” Photographer Pamela Hanson agrees: “A lot of celebrities prefer to be photographed by a man,” she says. “They like the sexual tension that occurs. The flattery is different too. And good luck trying to find a female hairstylist or makeup artist [on photo shoots]!” (You can find plenty in this issue—including in Hanson’s own story on page 116.) And another reason some celebs choose men? It’s because…

Men rule the “glass runway.” That’s a term some sociologists have used for the historical bias against women designers (and, by extension, female fashion photographers and hair and makeup talent). “In the twenties and thirties, women really dominated high fashion in Paris—­Lanvin, Chanel,” says Steele. “But after World War II, as a result of economic and cultural changes, it was back to the home for women, and suddenly fashion’s big names were male. In the fifties you had all these gender stereotypes: There was the idea that women are too close to it—they can only dress themselves. Men are the artists.”

That idea persists today. “There’s a subtle gendering in the fashion and beauty industry where, if you’re a woman interested in clothes or makeup, people assume you’re superficial or somehow not as serious about your work—but if you’re a man, you must be some sort of creative genius,” says Allyson Stokes, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who studies the industry. “My research shows that even the words used to describe the collections of female designers are different. Women’s clothes are called things like ‘wearable’ and ‘great for real life,’ while terms like ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘innovative’ are applied to men’s designs.” That can apply to hair and makeup too: “I do think there’s this idea that hair done by a woman is considered more wearable and a man’s work is ‘sharp’ and ‘architectural,’ ” says Stephen. Tilbury agrees: “I never felt like I lost a job because I was a woman, but there is this old-fashioned view of men being the mad geniuses who do heavier, less everyday makeup than women do.”

Sometimes it’s true that women-designed clothes or hairstyles are more wearable. After all, female creators understand how women need to work and move through the world. But Stokes says those differences don’t account for the discrepancy. After analyzing the adjectives in 157 profiles about male and female designers, she found a clear, consistent pattern: Clothes created by men were described as “art” 68 times, while women got the same compliment only 10 times. “It’s the language we have inherited to talk about art and creativity,” she explains. “It’s unclear why, but the words we use to praise art are masculine. The first image that pops to our minds is Michelangelo or van Gogh toiling away at their craft.” But that’s a stereotype, not a reality: “Both sexes can be powerful and nurturing and creative geniuses,” Risman points out. “We need to insist that the same expectations and standards apply to women and men—and challenge anyone who tries to tell us otherwise.”

The Ripple Effect

Getting women plum assignments will be great for female barrier breakers. But does it really matter for anyone else? Unequivocally yes, experts told Glamour. “I hate to generalize, but you can’t deny that there’s a difference between men’s and women’s photography,” says Hanson. “We have a certain sensibility, a girlfriend vibe that I think translates to the images you see. It’s not as sexualized.”Photographer de Cadenet agrees. She founded #GirlGaze, a multimedia project that helps women break in to photography, to challenge traditional gender roles often seen in media. “You can give 10 people a camera and a subject, and they’re all going to shoot it differently,” she says. “Women have more diverse ideas about what’s beautiful and strong and sensual and powerful. We want to see the real experience of being female, which is messy and imperfect and complicated and every hair is not in place. By putting more women behind the camera, we’ll see a more inclusive female experience.”

Even the stories themselves are different when women are the ones telling them, since women have access to certain spaces that men don’t—domestic abuse shelters, for instance, or living rooms where women can take off their hijabs. “In my work I’ve found that being a woman has allowed me to work in certain environments in a way that my male counterparts may not have been able to,” says Nancy Borowick, a documentary photographer whose work has appeared in Time and The New York Times. “I think my approach to storytelling has allowed me to get closer and establish the trust and intimacy necessary for meaningful work.” (There are some other surprising results of shooting while female, she notes: “At times I’ve found myself too short to see over my male colleagues at an event, but it forced me to be creative—I would shoot through their legs, using them to frame my shot—and would get something different and more interesting in the end.”)

Some experts Glamour spoke to also argue that the images female photographers take focus more on emotion and storytelling as opposed to pure action—and that men sometimes present a more sexualized view of women. That difference, however slight, is a powerful one. “Women see a massive number of images every day from all types of media,” says psychologist Lara Pence, Ph.D., a body-image expert at Embody Love Movement, which teaches workshops on self-esteem to teens and adults. “If half of the images we see today were by women, it could have a profoundly positive impact on women’s body image, sense of self, and beauty standards—their whole view of the world.” Pence believes that’s no exaggeration: “When we are shot through the lens of being small, sexual, and submissive, by men or otherwise, we unconsciously believe that this is the only way to exist in the world,” she says. “When women are given permission to be more than those things, they will be. If a female photographer encourages a woman to be strong and bold on a shoot, she will feel more space and room to be those things, and then the reader who sees it will be given more permission to do the same. It’s validating to know that there’s more than one way to ‘show up’ in the world.”

In reality there are as many ways to “show up” as there are women. Let’s see more of their work on billboards, museum walls, and yes, on magazine pages! “We’re in a real moment where there are cracks in the foundation,” says Risman, “and we have an opportunity to break it wide open.”